Affordable Home NAS: D-Link DNS-313 Review. Page 3

Todayw e are going to talk about 1-Bay SATA Network Storage Enclosure from D-Link called DNS-313. It accommodates one 3.5” SATA hard drive. It also accepts a USB connection, to serve as Direct Attached Storage (DAS) for any computer. Read more in our review!

Now let’s check out the interior of our DNS-313. We had to unfasten four screws at its back panel to take it apart. Two screws attach the panel to the case while the other two hold a metallic piece with the fan. After that we could take a look at the device’s PCB which was inserted into grooves in the interior panels of the case and pressed with self-tipping screws at the edges.

There are few components on the PCB and all of them are mounted neatly. Most of them face the side panel of the case. The reverse side of the PCB carries connectors for external devices (HDD, fan, etc).

The DNS-313 is based on a SoC controller SL3512 manufactured by Storm Semiconductor which can often be found in low-end NASes. Besides everything else, this controller incorporates an ARM9 processor clocked at 300MHz.

The DNS-313 doesn’t make use of all the capabilities of the SL3512 as you can see from the flowchart. In fact, the NAS only uses the processor and the SATA port.

There are bonding pads on the PCB for installing two consoles supported by the SL3512: a 4-pin UART and a 20-pin GPIO.

The NAS’s system memory is represented by a 32-megabyte NT5DS16M16CS chip from Nanya. Its capacity is large enough even for midrange NASes.

The OS is stored on the internal HDD, so there is only a boot-loader in the NAS’s flash memory. It fitted into a 512MB Spansion S29AL004D90TF102 chip.

The SL3512 incorporates two Gigabit Ethernet controllers, but the DNS-313 employs a discrete RTL8211B controller from Realtek instead.

That’s about all we can tell you about the internal configuration of the DNS-313.